This is the kind of game that made me want to start game development as a hobby. Love the twist on a well-known game. Love the depth. Love the balancing.
Maybe you should figure out why everybody else seams to loves it. When designing your games it might be good to know what other players like that you don’t?
I like Minesweeper, and it's okay that people like this game. I don't think people play traditional minesweeper as seriously as I do, which is why I have a strong opinion. I don't mind that people like this game, but I have a genuine complaint about the the design of the game because I feel its against the spirit of minesweeper itself. Again, I don't really expect people to agree with me, but the arguments given against me fail to respect my own feelings on the game. In fact, most of the points against me make it seem like i'm being unreasonable to articulate the differences in the games I enjoy and this one.
I cant speak for the designer of the game but for me it has more to do of the spirit of lerning patterns and secrets then game of minesweeper.
Its like a 5 minuts game of caves of qud, any other roug or tactics game with random elements. It maks you feal a bit smarter for every “death” and still adding to a new experience the next run.
I don’t think this game in any way, shape or form takeaway anything from the original minesweeper. If anything it may add to it if people find this game intriguing.
And i don’t think the minesweeper mechanics is the core of this game at all… it’s just the thing to deliver the experience of progress.
Not trolling! just telling you my 2 cents! (Probobly worth nothing) 😉
I understand your point, having it called sweeper I was expecting a different type of gameplay. I think you might like Mamano sweeper, it feels much closer to mine sweeper, and also has dragons to slay!
I found another monster behaviour: Minotaurs are always adjacent to a treasure chest, and facing away from it. They might be one row above or below it, tho
If you open the chest before killing them, they will turn around and get a "startled" expression.
Call me a hater, but this hits no fun difficultly. I cannot express how much minesweeper ive played and how unbalanced this game seems. I might try again later but after 30+ tries i'm sick of it.
I think you might be missing some information, if you pay attention to the layouts of the enemies when you die you may be able to discern some helpful patterns…
The fact that you write "blind guesses" states that you have missed something.
There are nonlethal guesses that one has to often make in the game. Learning to understand the dynamics of such guesses is what the game is about. After mastering, it is rather easy to manage these, and the game becomes consistently beatable.
Then there are lethal guesses, that one makes when things have gone bad. This happens rarely if playing with a good strategy, though can happen (especially on the first few moves, when the discovered board size is still so tiny). If going for the three stamps extra achievement victory, then this happens more often, because the rats get in the way. But in general play, it is possible to beat the game with a routine.
Not all games are for everyone. It is good to learn that, and if/when that happens, just move on, rather than to get worked up for no reason and go shouting in the comments.
I get the layouts, its not a good minesweeper layout. I understand if i see a row of 8s theres a quick 1 hit enemy in the back. I get the ?s and the pattern of the map. This is closer to a puzzle game with one critical path than a minesweeper game where youre exploring a map and given information to clear the map. In the game of minesweeper, you don't need meta knowledge to beat the map youre playing. In minesweeper, theres very few instances where you have to make a blind guess into territory to find and 8 spot surrounded by mines. This game isn't very fun, in my honest opinion and im glad you find this enjoyable yourself but don't tell me im missing information. The game isn't designed in a way that i find enjoyable and ive decided its not a game for me. I dont hate it, but as a game designer myself i feel that the direction this game decided to go in is fundamentally against the design of minesweeper itself. If theres only one critical path to winning the game, then its not a very good minesweeper game in its design in my opinion. And im allowed to feel this way, the same way you feel like its a simple game.
I concur with what others have told you. I think you might be missing something. I just started playing this yesterday, and after failing the first few tries, it's pretty easy to beat the game consistently. The hard part is getting the perfect score, that I have not yet achieved. And sure, if you know the "1" surrounded by "8" pattern, you can go faster, etc. but those are not needed for beating the game (I just learned about them a few mins ago reading comments here actually, but it was never a blocker for finishing the game).
I must be, clearly, Cause the winning strategy that worked for me is very much opposed to how i feel minesweeper should be played and thats okay this game is different but I am an avid fan of minesweeper as a game and this takes away from the design of minesweeper i've come to enjoy. I've watched some videos of other people playing, and the strategy seems more luck based than logic based which is not what minesweeper should be.
But the design is minesweeper with hidden information. Every enemy except for the bats, skeletons and green slimes has a feature that you can use to make deductions:
Why are there different sprites for the mice?
Why are the shields of the guardians different?
Why does the minotaur turn around when you open a chest?
Is there a pattern in how gargoyles appear?
Where does the mine-exploding scroll skeleton usually appear?
Thats meta knowledge, and I think having to lose enough games to understand each of those aspects makes for an interesting dungeon crawler game, but not a very fun Minesweeper game. Forgive me for feeling this way, but this feels like a puzzle game like memory cards and not a puzzle game like minesweeper.
Having played earlier versions of this game, where the last meaningful action you could take was killing the dragon, it took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out how to get the max score on the newer versions of the game.
There is no pattern to the bats and skeletons that I've figured out so far. The gnome appears in a random blank space, and if you hit him, he teleports and hides in another one. If there are no more blank spaces, he's trapped and you "defeat" him, and can claim his 9 exp bounty
I mean Top Right second row, the 7, the Guardian, the guy with the sword and shield. its position usually indicates something, but I can't tell what this one's supposed to be telling me.
Ooh, I didn't notice Bomb Stopper is holding a bomb until now!
There are four Guardians, each of them have a different symbol on their shield, if that helps as a hint.
Spoiler
Each Guardian exists in one of the four quadrants of the map, as indicated on their shield. So if you know where the guardian is in a quadrant, you know it is impossible to encounter another 7 there.
You'll see your files and folders... click through to where your Dragonsweeper folder is that you unzipped. Click on index.html -- you should be able to play the game. It'll be the older version with the two orbs start.
I'm not convinced by the argument that you should save heart scrolls because they're "worth more" later in the game. Levelling is also "worth more" later in the game! In my experience, if you use a scroll earlier, you'll have more XP for levelling later, and in the end game it all comes out in the wash.
You should save heart scrolls because:
1. You can use a heart scroll at any time, but you can only level if you have enough XP. You can get stuck with not enough XP and either no hearts available to get more or no safe moves available to get more.
2. Using a heart scroll makes you repeat the current heart level. This can be damaging early in the game, when you have a much more limited set of safe moves available, they don't always open up more safe moves, and using up more of them without progressing towards being able to take out bigger monsters (especially the mine king) can hurt you.
The time to think about this is not when you have no choice but to use a heart scroll, but when you are considering possible monster combinations earlier -- it's usually better to fill your XP and level than to risk not filling it and falling short. Especially if you're trying to get the rat stamp, which makes exploration very risky, and makes eliminating known monsters until you find the rat king a lot safer.
So, to refute that point, first let's establish that, with the exception of walls, every time you spend life, you gain that much experience. Sometimes you can get experience for free, and walls are a loss on return and should always be broken last, anyway. In all other cases, you spend your HP, and if you don't die, you get that much in EXP back. Let's also understand that there is a max HP, but there is no max EXP, you can pool it as much as you want.
At the start of the game, you have 5 HP, and you need 4 EXP to level up. You spend your 5 life, and you now have 5 EXP. You now have the choice to either level up or to use a heal scroll. In the first case, your health refills back up to 5 (with half a heart towards a max of 6 next level!) and you have 1 EXP banked towards reaching the new limit of 5 EXP. If you use a health scroll, you refill your 5 hearts right away, and keep your 5 banked EXP.
Here's the crux of the matter. No matter which scenario you pick, you still have to spend 4 EXP to level up. You're not saving it for later, you STILL have to spend that 4 EXP, you're just delaying when you spend it. However, since there is a direct relationship between HP and EXP, you have assigned that scroll a worth of 5 EXP while using it while your max HP is only 5 hearts. If you waited until you had, say, 7 hearts or 10 hearts or even more, that is how much EXP that scroll would be worth. By using it early, you miss out on the potential for that scroll to be even more valuable. Meanwhile, the experience you gain by spending your health down as normal is experience you will gain one way or the other, and it will be spent on leveling up one way or the other. Scrolls are always worth more the longer you hold off of using them.
That said, unless you're aiming for something in specific, you don't have to be perfectly 100% optimal to win. It helps your odds, for sure, but if you would rather use a scroll for safety than take a gamble on something you're unsure on, its better to keep the run going than not.
OK, after a bunch of paper and pencil calculations I remembered that the game has a debug mode. :) I compared a couple of strategies for using the scrolls (various numbers of scrolls and different bonuses ignored or not), and I can see now how the maths works.
The lower early value of the scrolls is partially offset by the lower amount of XP needed to level at the early stages, which makes the penalty less noticeable in a typical game, but in extreme cases (all available scrolls spent before any levelling) the constant low value of the scrolls plus the additional HP gained and spent during levelling is not enough to match the increasing XP cost of levelling. That was the missing link for me.
I'm somehow unable to get the full clear (max score of 365). I got the other 3 stamps already, but I always seem to miscalculate somehow. My strategy is to get 0 hearts and then either level up or get a full health boost and repeat. Do I need to do something else as well? Certain monsters at specfic health levels or something?
It's important to get at least some of the free exp drops early so that you can save your health scrolls as long as possible. HP = EXP, but things like chests and the egg give you an advantage in that calculation. Always try to drain your HP to 0 hearts before leveling up, and if you have the choice between leveling up and using a health scroll, level up. The more health you have, the more health a scroll is "worth", so saving them as long as possible gives you more total effective health. Also, you want to kill the lich as SOON as you have 10 hearts, or as close to then as possible. That gives you a massive load of experience you can use to carry you through the next few levels without using scrolls.
If I have two unexplored spots, and the "clue number" is 106, I know one is a mine and the other is six.
Whereas if you've exploded the mines, the "clue number" would be 6 and you wouldn't know that is exploded-mine and a six. For all you know it's 5+1, 4+2, or 3+3.
There is no downside to using the explode mines scroll immediately. When shooting for max score of 365, it is best to plan to find and use the scroll so that you can trigger it immediately when you XP up to 10 hearts.
If I have two unexplored spots, and the "clue number" is 106, I know one is a mine and the other is six.
Whereas if you've exploded the mines, the "clue number" would be 6 and you wouldn't know that is exploded-mine and a six. For all you know it's 5+1, 4+2, or 3+3.
In practice there is very little reason to not blow up the mines immediately when it becomes possible. This is because one has to do it before having to resort to the next health scroll (the XP from the mines is better), and at that point of the game, since one has >= 10 HP, then there are no things on the board that can kill the player at health. (only mimic chest, but it makes itself known on click) So ambiguities are not that important anymore.
It's not a 100% guaranteed possibility like with earlier easier versions. Never heal up unless you've depleted your health pool. Minotaurs always guard a chest. And chests are always guarded by minotaurs. Guardians are 1 per qudrant. Use that info when calculating exploration risk, but don't forget the 9HP and 11HP oddities. Level up instead of healing whenever you can. THE VERY MOMENT you hit 10HP, take out the bomb lich and score another easy level up. Look for the 8x8x8 pattern of the slime wizard and deep strike on his butt (You can blind jump into a square). Learn the ? gazers patterns and they can similarly be nuked from orbit with pinpoint precision. Try not to waste HP on walls until the very last sweep and remember you can kill the dragon for 13G without ending the run which comes in handy on that very last cleanup pass. Play cleverly and take every advantage of the numbers. I can pull it off maybe 30% of the time.
I don’t know if my numbers are correct but if they are.. in theory the max possible “3 stamp run” would be 331/365. I don’t know if it’s possible in acount to levels.
This information needs leveling information to accompany to make it truly useful. Just did a quick and dirty full clear to get this data, will analyze it in a moment to see what a "perfect run" would look like.
Edit: Level 11 is 18 for level up, not 17, I had to check again because math wasn't mathing.
Ok, I've done the math, you have EXACTLY enough health to be able to reach 325 on a three stamp run, so leaving just the walls, the rats (rat king is fine), the lovers, and the egg. You need to use your first HP scroll once you're on 9 hearts, even with perfect play that's as best as you can get. To pull that off, you also need to find the three exp chest as well as isolate the gnome BEFORE you reach 10 hearts and can pop the Lich, just to have enough EXP. Then you should be able to just spend your scrolls as needed, prioritizing level ups. You should be on track if you use your second health scroll on 11.5 hearts, and then one scroll per level before you run out.
This is a very minor thing, but while the EXP math is correct to my eyes, its important to note that the 9 HP scrolls on the map include the ones in the chests. So there are 2 in the chests, and then 7 otherwise (2 of those 7 being entangled with the Lovers, of course)
Most browsers won't let JavaScript to load local files for security theater reasons.
You'll either have to host it with a local web server, or embed the resources as data URLs. If you do the latter and want to open it in Firefox, you'll have to re-encode the music file, as it exceeds the Firefox's limit on data URL's length.
They just sort of jumbled some screenshots and added another random game and an irrelevant description which is funny. Thought I'd give you a heads up.
I ended up patching a function into loadImage that substituted base64 encoded copies of the graphics to get my copy working without disabling CORS in FireFox (file:// is automatically assumed to be dirty by default.).
Dunno why audio didn’t trip CORS, but I won’t complain if the offical version also gets a 830kb js file just to hold the additional code with the encoded files.
There is a space next to the Dragon, randomly chosen from the 8 adjacent spaces, that contains an egg. It registers as a 0, so you have to get kind of lucky to isolate it from regular blanks near the dragon, that or you just avoid breaking 0s near the dragon entirely. If you break it, you can get a free 3 exp, but if you preserve it to the end, you get the achievement.
There is a way to make it less random if you’re just going for the Future Generations achievement
Spoiler
Leave the squares around the dragon unclicked unless you know for certain they contain a monster. When you get the blue orb scroll, don’t use it. Save it for close to the end and if it has nowhere else to proc, it will reveal the squares around the dragon.
It’s not a slamdunk with the three stamp attempt, because you likely won’t have enough hearts to clear the board unless you’re very careful about only spending hearts on unrevealed monsters (vs the slimes that get revealed by the slime mage scroll).
I found the best strat for the three stamp run is to restart the game (you can just press R for a quick reset) until you get a favorable starting reveal. Ideally you want the mice to limit the search area for the rat king to no more than 3 columns or, ideally, indicate the exact column it’s in. Otherwise it’s almost impossible not to accidentally click on unrevealed mice as you work your way through the board.
I have absolutely been in love with this game since I stumbled across it at 1.0. I love the challenge of it and all the secret tricks of the monsters, giving you the tools to solve otherwise impossible scenarios using logic. It's very satisfying and I keep the tab open because I want to play it again and again. Just now I finished a run, challenging myself to get three stamps in one go. Excited to see what else comes out of this game, thank you for all your hard work.
Not sure how easy/hard the older versions were, though I do now get a clear on almost every run, and those come with max clears rather easily. If I don't clear, it is typically because I made a calculation mistake and stumbled onto an unintended high level monster.
It does feel quite balanced to me in the sense that in the beginning it felt hard ("how is it even possible"), but after mastering the decisions to make, it becomes easy. Very much like FTL or Into the Breach. At this point I wish there was a Hard mode.
For anyone wanting to download and launch the game locally, you will need to install a web server.
One way to do this is to download the Python programming language for your OS, open a command prompt window in the Dragonsweeper folder, and type "python -m http.server --bind 127.0.0.1 8000".
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Why is there an option to mark a square with a 12?
Absolutely loved it! Didn't know how to play Minesweeper, so I learned just so I could play this. Game of the year!
so, the unique text for deaths are:
Zapped by the wizard
Slain by a skeleton
petrified by a gargoyle
consumed by a slime
lobotimized by a gazer
Trampled by a minotaur
liquified by a slime (the purple ones around the wizard, I'm not sure why they have the same name as the green ones)
Mauled by Romeo
Mauled by Juliet
crushed by the mine king
eaten by the mimic
Torched by the dragon
exploded by a mine
Brilliant, and a severe threat to the paper writing I'm supposed to do 😅
is this supposed to happen?
Yes, it's health was decreased from 15 to 13 in the latest update
This is the kind of game that made me want to start game development as a hobby. Love the twist on a well-known game. Love the depth. Love the balancing.
I beat it. My opinions still stand.
Maybe you should figure out why everybody else seams to loves it. When designing your games it might be good to know what other players like that you don’t?
I like Minesweeper, and it's okay that people like this game. I don't think people play traditional minesweeper as seriously as I do, which is why I have a strong opinion. I don't mind that people like this game, but I have a genuine complaint about the the design of the game because I feel its against the spirit of minesweeper itself. Again, I don't really expect people to agree with me, but the arguments given against me fail to respect my own feelings on the game. In fact, most of the points against me make it seem like i'm being unreasonable to articulate the differences in the games I enjoy and this one.
I cant speak for the designer of the game but for me it has more to do of the spirit of lerning patterns and secrets then game of minesweeper.
Its like a 5 minuts game of caves of qud, any other roug or tactics game with random elements. It maks you feal a bit smarter for every “death” and still adding to a new experience the next run.
I don’t think this game in any way, shape or form takeaway anything from the original minesweeper. If anything it may add to it if people find this game intriguing.
And i don’t think the minesweeper mechanics is the core of this game at all… it’s just the thing to deliver the experience of progress.
Not trolling! just telling you my 2 cents! (Probobly worth nothing) 😉
I understand your point, having it called sweeper I was expecting a different type of gameplay. I think you might like Mamano sweeper, it feels much closer to mine sweeper, and also has dragons to slay!
I found another monster behaviour: Minotaurs are always adjacent to a treasure chest, and facing away from it. They might be one row above or below it, tho
If you open the chest before killing them, they will turn around and get a "startled" expression.
I desire the music!
This game is awesome, thank you so much
Got me locked in for 30 minutes & pretty good
I used debug for this run. you should add some sort of indicator to the end screen so people don't try to pass debug runs off as real
Why on earth is this game so HARD i love minesweeper and this is stressing me out lmao
Call me a hater, but this hits no fun difficultly. I cannot express how much minesweeper ive played and how unbalanced this game seems. I might try again later but after 30+ tries i'm sick of it.
I think you might be missing some information, if you pay attention to the layouts of the enemies when you die you may be able to discern some helpful patterns…
Im going to beat this game just so i can explain fully why i actually very much dislike this game okay
I beat it, and theres honestly no reason why there should be that many blind guesses to win.
The fact that you write "blind guesses" states that you have missed something.
There are nonlethal guesses that one has to often make in the game. Learning to understand the dynamics of such guesses is what the game is about. After mastering, it is rather easy to manage these, and the game becomes consistently beatable.
Then there are lethal guesses, that one makes when things have gone bad. This happens rarely if playing with a good strategy, though can happen (especially on the first few moves, when the discovered board size is still so tiny). If going for the three stamps extra achievement victory, then this happens more often, because the rats get in the way. But in general play, it is possible to beat the game with a routine.
Not all games are for everyone. It is good to learn that, and if/when that happens, just move on, rather than to get worked up for no reason and go shouting in the comments.
I get the layouts, its not a good minesweeper layout. I understand if i see a row of 8s theres a quick 1 hit enemy in the back. I get the ?s and the pattern of the map. This is closer to a puzzle game with one critical path than a minesweeper game where youre exploring a map and given information to clear the map. In the game of minesweeper, you don't need meta knowledge to beat the map youre playing. In minesweeper, theres very few instances where you have to make a blind guess into territory to find and 8 spot surrounded by mines.
This game isn't very fun, in my honest opinion and im glad you find this enjoyable yourself but don't tell me im missing information. The game isn't designed in a way that i find enjoyable and ive decided its not a game for me. I dont hate it, but as a game designer myself i feel that the direction this game decided to go in is fundamentally against the design of minesweeper itself.
If theres only one critical path to winning the game, then its not a very good minesweeper game in its design in my opinion. And im allowed to feel this way, the same way you feel like its a simple game.
I concur with what others have told you. I think you might be missing something. I just started playing this yesterday, and after failing the first few tries, it's pretty easy to beat the game consistently. The hard part is getting the perfect score, that I have not yet achieved. And sure, if you know the "1" surrounded by "8" pattern, you can go faster, etc. but those are not needed for beating the game (I just learned about them a few mins ago reading comments here actually, but it was never a blocker for finishing the game).
I must be, clearly, Cause the winning strategy that worked for me is very much opposed to how i feel minesweeper should be played and thats okay this game is different but I am an avid fan of minesweeper as a game and this takes away from the design of minesweeper i've come to enjoy. I've watched some videos of other people playing, and the strategy seems more luck based than logic based which is not what minesweeper should be.
But the design is minesweeper with hidden information. Every enemy except for the bats, skeletons and green slimes has a feature that you can use to make deductions:
etc etc
Thats meta knowledge, and I think having to lose enough games to understand each of those aspects makes for an interesting dungeon crawler game, but not a very fun Minesweeper game. Forgive me for feeling this way, but this feels like a puzzle game like memory cards and not a puzzle game like minesweeper.
Make sure you are collecting XP, leveling up at the right time and saving hearts for when you absolutely need them.
Yeah, that's obvious enough.
Having played earlier versions of this game, where the last meaningful action you could take was killing the dragon, it took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out how to get the max score on the newer versions of the game.
Oh my gosh THANK YOU for posting this! I was making exactly the same mistake and only realised after reading your comment.
victory
alright boys who can beat 6:27 max score
ayy
Beat this time on a 3 stamp run!
I don’t know why it’s 8 it felt longer when I was doing the run so my time my be bugged. I’m playing it in the webrowser on an android phone.
nice.....either way I gotta beat 8:05 now!
finally got there.
Super impressive! Just so you know I can confirm that the times are bugged on my web/android game.
Just made a max score 2 stamp run and it claims I made it in 5 seconds 🤣
I can't stop playing! <3
A+
What do the skeletons, bats, and gnome do?
I think I've managed to figure everyone else's trick out.
There is no pattern to the bats and skeletons that I've figured out so far. The gnome appears in a random blank space, and if you hit him, he teleports and hides in another one. If there are no more blank spaces, he's trapped and you "defeat" him, and can claim his 9 exp bounty
What's the Top Right Guardian guarding?
on version 1.1.18
Top right ? if you mean top left he disable all the bombs
I mean Top Right second row, the 7, the Guardian, the guy with the sword and shield. its position usually indicates something, but I can't tell what this one's supposed to be telling me.
Ooh, I didn't notice Bomb Stopper is holding a bomb until now!
There are four Guardians, each of them have a different symbol on their shield, if that helps as a hint.
Spoiler
Each Guardian exists in one of the four quadrants of the map, as indicated on their shield. So if you know where the guardian is in a quadrant, you know it is impossible to encounter another 7 there.
Too bad we can't do HTML in comments?
https://itch.io/t/2151831/adding-spoiler-text-to-your-game-description
Oh, I found a false pattern! Pattern Spoilers:
I thought the Guardians were like Minotaurs, but instead of 1 space away from a Chest, they were 2 spaces or something.
I've tried this game on my desktop and on my laptop and both are stuck on the loading screen(colored lines). Anyone know what is going on
If you open your browser's developer tools, do you see any error messages in the console?
Solution if you are on Mac:
1. Open the "Terminal" application. Enter the following text and press enter:
python -m http.server
2. Open your browser and go to:
http://localhost:8000/
You'll see your files and folders... click through to where your Dragonsweeper folder is that you unzipped. Click on index.html -- you should be able to play the game. It'll be the older version with the two orbs start.
I would do but I just tried running it in the browser and it's actually working. This is an addictive game :D
I'm not convinced by the argument that you should save heart scrolls because they're "worth more" later in the game. Levelling is also "worth more" later in the game! In my experience, if you use a scroll earlier, you'll have more XP for levelling later, and in the end game it all comes out in the wash.
You should save heart scrolls because:
1. You can use a heart scroll at any time, but you can only level if you have enough XP. You can get stuck with not enough XP and either no hearts available to get more or no safe moves available to get more.
2. Using a heart scroll makes you repeat the current heart level. This can be damaging early in the game, when you have a much more limited set of safe moves available, they don't always open up more safe moves, and using up more of them without progressing towards being able to take out bigger monsters (especially the mine king) can hurt you.
The time to think about this is not when you have no choice but to use a heart scroll, but when you are considering possible monster combinations earlier -- it's usually better to fill your XP and level than to risk not filling it and falling short. Especially if you're trying to get the rat stamp, which makes exploration very risky, and makes eliminating known monsters until you find the rat king a lot safer.
So, to refute that point, first let's establish that, with the exception of walls, every time you spend life, you gain that much experience. Sometimes you can get experience for free, and walls are a loss on return and should always be broken last, anyway. In all other cases, you spend your HP, and if you don't die, you get that much in EXP back. Let's also understand that there is a max HP, but there is no max EXP, you can pool it as much as you want.
At the start of the game, you have 5 HP, and you need 4 EXP to level up. You spend your 5 life, and you now have 5 EXP. You now have the choice to either level up or to use a heal scroll. In the first case, your health refills back up to 5 (with half a heart towards a max of 6 next level!) and you have 1 EXP banked towards reaching the new limit of 5 EXP. If you use a health scroll, you refill your 5 hearts right away, and keep your 5 banked EXP.
Here's the crux of the matter. No matter which scenario you pick, you still have to spend 4 EXP to level up. You're not saving it for later, you STILL have to spend that 4 EXP, you're just delaying when you spend it. However, since there is a direct relationship between HP and EXP, you have assigned that scroll a worth of 5 EXP while using it while your max HP is only 5 hearts. If you waited until you had, say, 7 hearts or 10 hearts or even more, that is how much EXP that scroll would be worth. By using it early, you miss out on the potential for that scroll to be even more valuable. Meanwhile, the experience you gain by spending your health down as normal is experience you will gain one way or the other, and it will be spent on leveling up one way or the other. Scrolls are always worth more the longer you hold off of using them.
That said, unless you're aiming for something in specific, you don't have to be perfectly 100% optimal to win. It helps your odds, for sure, but if you would rather use a scroll for safety than take a gamble on something you're unsure on, its better to keep the run going than not.
OK, after a bunch of paper and pencil calculations I remembered that the game has a debug mode. :) I compared a couple of strategies for using the scrolls (various numbers of scrolls and different bonuses ignored or not), and I can see now how the maths works.
The lower early value of the scrolls is partially offset by the lower amount of XP needed to level at the early stages, which makes the penalty less noticeable in a typical game, but in extreme cases (all available scrolls spent before any levelling) the constant low value of the scrolls plus the additional HP gained and spent during levelling is not enough to match the increasing XP cost of levelling. That was the missing link for me.
How do you access debug mode in the current version? Used to be you could just hit D, but that was removed.
Shift+D
Bless, this is very useful for testing things, thank you
I'm somehow unable to get the full clear (max score of 365). I got the other 3 stamps already, but I always seem to miscalculate somehow. My strategy is to get 0 hearts and then either level up or get a full health boost and repeat. Do I need to do something else as well? Certain monsters at specfic health levels or something?
It's important to get at least some of the free exp drops early so that you can save your health scrolls as long as possible. HP = EXP, but things like chests and the egg give you an advantage in that calculation. Always try to drain your HP to 0 hearts before leveling up, and if you have the choice between leveling up and using a health scroll, level up. The more health you have, the more health a scroll is "worth", so saving them as long as possible gives you more total effective health. Also, you want to kill the lich as SOON as you have 10 hearts, or as close to then as possible. That gives you a massive load of experience you can use to carry you through the next few levels without using scrolls.
Agree with above, plus I like to save using the "explode mines" scroll until I have figured out where all the mines are (if possible).
Why? You can find mines with less risk once they're exploded.
If I have two unexplored spots, and the "clue number" is 106, I know one is a mine and the other is six.
Whereas if you've exploded the mines, the "clue number" would be 6 and you wouldn't know that is exploded-mine and a six. For all you know it's 5+1, 4+2, or 3+3.
There is no downside to using the explode mines scroll immediately. When shooting for max score of 365, it is best to plan to find and use the scroll so that you can trigger it immediately when you XP up to 10 hearts.
If I have two unexplored spots, and the "clue number" is 106, I know one is a mine and the other is six.
Whereas if you've exploded the mines, the "clue number" would be 6 and you wouldn't know that is exploded-mine and a six. For all you know it's 5+1, 4+2, or 3+3.
Very good - that is of course true!
In practice there is very little reason to not blow up the mines immediately when it becomes possible. This is because one has to do it before having to resort to the next health scroll (the XP from the mines is better), and at that point of the game, since one has >= 10 HP, then there are no things on the board that can kill the player at health. (only mimic chest, but it makes itself known on click) So ambiguities are not that important anymore.
It's not a 100% guaranteed possibility like with earlier easier versions. Never heal up unless you've depleted your health pool. Minotaurs always guard a chest. And chests are always guarded by minotaurs. Guardians are 1 per qudrant. Use that info when calculating exploration risk, but don't forget the 9HP and 11HP oddities. Level up instead of healing whenever you can. THE VERY MOMENT you hit 10HP, take out the bomb lich and score another easy level up. Look for the 8x8x8 pattern of the slime wizard and deep strike on his butt (You can blind jump into a square). Learn the ? gazers patterns and they can similarly be nuked from orbit with pinpoint precision. Try not to waste HP on walls until the very last sweep and remember you can kill the dragon for 13G without ending the run which comes in handy on that very last cleanup pass. Play cleverly and take every advantage of the numbers. I can pull it off maybe 30% of the time.
I don’t know if my numbers are correct but if they are.. in theory the max possible “3 stamp run” would be 331/365. I don’t know if it’s possible in acount to levels.
This information needs leveling information to accompany to make it truly useful. Just did a quick and dirty full clear to get this data,
will analyze it in a moment to see what a "perfect run" would look like.
Edit: Level 11 is 18 for level up, not 17, I had to check again because math wasn't mathing.
Ok, I've done the math, you have EXACTLY enough health to be able to reach 325 on a three stamp run, so leaving just the walls, the rats (rat king is fine), the lovers, and the egg. You need to use your first HP scroll once you're on 9 hearts, even with perfect play that's as best as you can get. To pull that off, you also need to find the three exp chest as well as isolate the gnome BEFORE you reach 10 hearts and can pop the Lich, just to have enough EXP. Then you should be able to just spend your scrolls as needed, prioritizing level ups. You should be on track if you use your second health scroll on 11.5 hearts, and then one scroll per level before you run out.
I was a fraid of that. Hunting down the gnome before 10 seams super hard. Well now we know time to grind 🤣
303 so 22 to go!
Awesome work!
Couldn't have done it without you doing your own due diligence, thank you for that.
After a bit of experimenting i believe the lack of something meaningful to hit that takes 1 heart is a real problem mid (5-10) game.
You have to push to find the minotaurs/chests/gnome but you end up in a situation where you hit a 6 with 7 hearts or a 5 with 6 hearts.
225 score 3 stamps might be just to much luck to be a fun chalange 🤔
This is a very minor thing, but while the EXP math is correct to my eyes, its important to note that the 9 HP scrolls on the map include the ones in the chests. So there are 2 in the chests, and then 7 otherwise (2 of those 7 being entangled with the Lovers, of course)
Yes, this is badly explained in my data as taking scrolls yealds no points.
9 scrolls total = 5 random on map + 2 chests + 2 from lovers.
In a “Max stamp run” the max scrolls leavs you with 7 scrolls as you can’t kill the lovers.
Hehehe 3 stamps at once
I love the game, but is it possible to play this game offline? I've tried to open the gamefile but I get hit with this error
Show post...
ive also gotten an error.. its odd
Most browsers won't let JavaScript to load local files for security theater reasons.
You'll either have to host it with a local web server, or embed the resources as data URLs. If you do the latter and want to open it in Firefox, you'll have to re-encode the music file, as it exceeds the Firefox's limit on data URL's length.
I'm getting super fast, but the downside is now my screenshots look awkward :(
0:7:53 instead of 0:07:53
=)
nice, i'm only running max score though, you can have any% :)
Two things: 1) This is such a fun little game and I definitely should not have spent so much time playing it at work LMAO
2) Someone is trying to steal your game and is attempting to release it on the App Store (I saw it on Apple's). https://apps.apple.com/us/app/dragonsweeper-a-stratergy-game/id6739958486
They just sort of jumbled some screenshots and added another random game and an irrelevant description which is funny.
Thought I'd give you a heads up.
Donated :)) great game!
Downloaded for offline use, but the index.html gets stuck in Firefox and Chromium. Game works fine when running from itch.io page.
Any ideas?
I get the same glitch on itch.io, after my first time playing a few dozen rounds
For me, my web browser did not like loading local files. I had to restart chrome with the "--allow-file-access-from-files" flag:
see:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18474727/canvas-has-been-tainted-by-cross-or...
I ended up patching a function into
loadImagethat substituted base64 encoded copies of the graphics to get my copy working without disabling CORS in FireFox (file://is automatically assumed to be dirty by default.).Dunno why audio didn’t trip CORS, but I won’t complain if the offical version also gets a 830kb js file just to hold the additional code with the encoded files.
see https://itch.io/post/12090872
Soundtrack release? please?
Almost… I missed one chest forceing me to take one heart abit early. It may be possible to get 3 achevments and get 325+ 🤔
Ps. Timer seams to be bugged.. this did not take me 8 minutes 😉
What's up the "Future Generations" achievement? I've never come across that egg and I don't see it in the Monsternomicon
Spoiler
There is a space next to the Dragon, randomly chosen from the 8 adjacent spaces, that contains an egg. It registers as a 0, so you have to get kind of lucky to isolate it from regular blanks near the dragon, that or you just avoid breaking 0s near the dragon entirely. If you break it, you can get a free 3 exp, but if you preserve it to the end, you get the achievement.
There is a way to make it less random if you’re just going for the Future Generations achievement
Spoiler
Leave the squares around the dragon unclicked unless you know for certain they contain a monster. When you get the blue orb scroll, don’t use it. Save it for close to the end and if it has nowhere else to proc, it will reveal the squares around the dragon.
Oh, I didn't know that! I'll be sure to try that on my next three-stamp attempt. Thank you!
It’s not a slamdunk with the three stamp attempt, because you likely won’t have enough hearts to clear the board unless you’re very careful about only spending hearts on unrevealed monsters (vs the slimes that get revealed by the slime mage scroll).
I found the best strat for the three stamp run is to restart the game (you can just press R for a quick reset) until you get a favorable starting reveal. Ideally you want the mice to limit the search area for the rat king to no more than 3 columns or, ideally, indicate the exact column it’s in. Otherwise it’s almost impossible not to accidentally click on unrevealed mice as you work your way through the board.
This is big brain
I have absolutely been in love with this game since I stumbled across it at 1.0. I love the challenge of it and all the secret tricks of the monsters, giving you the tools to solve otherwise impossible scenarios using logic. It's very satisfying and I keep the tab open because I want to play it again and again. Just now I finished a run, challenging myself to get three stamps in one go. Excited to see what else comes out of this game, thank you for all your hard work.
Cool
How do you get a clear board stamp with the other stamps? Isn't clearing the board mutually exclusive with not killing rats/egg/lovers?
This is the summary of stamps got from previous games. So these stamps were getted from multiple games, at least 2.
noooo this is so sad 😭😭😭
i've killed everyone, but at what cost?
Is it harder to get a perfect score on the new version? I can beat the game but I'm struggling to perfect it.
Not sure how easy/hard the older versions were, though I do now get a clear on almost every run, and those come with max clears rather easily. If I don't clear, it is typically because I made a calculation mistake and stumbled onto an unintended high level monster.
It does feel quite balanced to me in the sense that in the beginning it felt hard ("how is it even possible"), but after mastering the decisions to make, it becomes easy. Very much like FTL or Into the Breach. At this point I wish there was a Hard mode.
Where can I find the newer version for download? When I click on the "Download Now" Button it shows me only the version 1.0.0.
For anyone wanting to download and launch the game locally, you will need to install a web server.
One way to do this is to download the Python programming language for your OS, open a command prompt window in the Dragonsweeper folder, and type "python -m http.server --bind 127.0.0.1 8000".
Then point your web browser at http://127.0.0.1:8000.